Body switchin'

Maybe one day Hollywood will release a movie about a utopian society where the utopian society actually works. Sure, there won’t be any conflict. But at this point, that hypothetical snooze-fest might be better than the dystopian dreck Hollywood comes out with now.

Surrogates, which is based off a 2005-2006 comic series by Robert Venditti, is the latest offender.

It is the year 2017, and mankind’s reliance on technology has reached a new high — everyone stays in the comfort of their own homes, plugs themselves into a machine, and sends a fully functional avatar into the world to live their lives for them. The result is a world full of pretty, glossy people straight out of a fashion catalogue — a world of shallow ideals where ugly girls have attractive surrogates and attractive surrogates are old men (well, sometimes).

This is all well and good until a surrogate is murdered, and its user is killed simultaneously.
The first half of the movie is simply a dumbed down procedural drama: Law and Order in the future, or NCIS with robots. Agent Greer (Bruce Willis, What Just Happened) and his partner Agent Peters (Radha Mitchell, Henry Poole is Here), FBI agents, try to track down the killer, who has some sort of secret weapon that apparently kills both surrogates and their users with an undercooked special effects ray.

Naturally, there is more to the story than that strand of plot — it eventually leads to a group called The Dreads, an anti-surrogate group led by a hairy Ving Rhames (The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard) in the midst of planning an uprising.

And there’s a twist, of course, which the movie hides for about 25 minutes before deciding subtlety is just too hard. The resultant clues are obvious.

It’s too bad, because although Surrogates’ main ideas aren’t new at all, they still contain interesting possibilities. It’s easy to use a premise such as this one to open a window into how characters behave in situations normal to them but foreign to us.

At least that’s one way to approach the film. Another way, which is the method screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris (Terminator Salvation) employed, is to use the dystopia merely as means for large-scale action sequences where helicopters crash into the ground and cars smash through store windows.

And even then, after the film’s status as a mindless popcorn flick has been cemented, it goes further into the realm of the dumb. For instance, as realistic and comparable to humans as surrogates are supposed to be, they somehow have the ability to leap like Mario (after eating the mushroom, mind you). Willis uses this super jumping power to chase someone in a gut-busting sequence where he leaps inhuman distances — with only one arm attached. And, perhaps most egregious of all: Willis’ surrogate has a full head of hair.

And then there’s the hilarious idea that in a futuristic society, with such mind-blowing, advanced technology, top military officials still use Windows Vista.

Elsewhere, the soundtrack is a constant, unnecessary presence, more useful for making eyes roll than hearts pump. Director Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) shoots for style, but the sheer amount of it becomes off-putting after a while.

The movie feels like it could be truncated considerably, but only runs 88 minutes. To its credit, though, Surrogates isn’t a complete waste. The opening documentary-style montage (see: District 9) is urgent, well made and an instant hook into Mostow’s world.

And then there are the nice minor touches, like the public charging stations for surrogates. They plant the seeds for a fun, thought-provoking movie. And although the film never really delivers, at least the seeds were there all along.

So, besides the vestiges of eye candy throughout, there’s not much to be enjoyed in Surrogates. As a character study set in a collapsing utopian society, it never delves deep enough or bothers to develop its characters. As a fun action thriller, it is rarely fun and only thrills once. And as a mindless, forgettable trip to the theater, well, actually, it mostly succeeds.

But the film’s flagrant stupidity is a disservice to its audience. They deserve better, and no amount of Willis — bald or wigged — can right those wrongs.

jwolper@umdbk.com

RATING: 1.5 out of 5 stars